Page 24 of Meet Cute Reboot
“DoS stands for Denial of Service,” Drew says while rolling his eyes. “Or, DDoS, which stands for Distributed Denial of Service.”
“What’s the difference?”
Drew narrows his eyes at Todd. “There is no difference.”
“O...kay...” Todd tries, “What is a botnet?”
“In this case, a botnet,” Drew says, over articulating each “t” again, “is a network of internet-connected computers infected by malware, which are being used to commit said cybercrime, i.e., your DoS attack. The zombies are firing off loops of HTTPS requests that are flooding your server.”
“Zombies?” Luke says. “Like, the zombie apocalypse?”
“Ha ha,” Drew says in a deadpan tone.
I’ve had enough technical babble. I just want to get to the point. “How do we fix it?”
“Wedon’t do anything. Your hosting company, ServeIt, has to identify the zombies and block their IP addresses one by one.”
“Why did this happen?” I continue to probe.
“Because ServeIt sucks. It took five hours just to get a web admin on the line.”
“You were on the phone for thirty minutes,” Bethany says.
“Time is relative.”
I don’t bother to unpack Drew’s statement. I’m too busy trying to make sense of the situation. Why am I paying out the wazoo for hosting if they can’t protect my app?
“Doesn’t ServeIt have firewalls or security stuff to protect against cyberattacks?” I ask.
“Clearly, they don’t have enough security ‘stuff,’” he says with air quotes. “They can’t even come up with a decent name for their company.”
“Okay, I get it. ServeIt sucks,” I say. “Their name sucks. We can deal with that later. I just want to know when my site will be back up.”
“They have to identify the IPs and then clear the backlog. Estimated delivery time is six hours. But since they don’t have ‘stuff’ in place to protect against botnet attacks, the botmaster could attack again tomorrow. What’s so funny?”
I look over at Luke. He’s covering a smile with his hand. He wipes his mouth. “Can you tell us more about those botnets?”
“Have you heard of Google?” Drew says. “You might want to try it out sometime.”
“All right. Well.” Todd starts jogging in place. “I guess there’s no sense waiting around for six hours.”
“Do you have a game to get back to?” Luke asks.
Todd nods and shoots an imaginary basketball through a hoop. Luke makes a sound like the crowd’s going wild. Bethany and I trade looks.
So much for professionalism. No one is as emotionally invested in my website as I am. That’s okay. I’ve got it under control.
“Drew. Luke,” I demand. “Conference room. Now.”
“Do you need me?” Bethany asks.
“No, I think I got this.”
“Okay. Call me when things are back up.” Bethany grabs her purse and then leans over to give me a light hug.
“I will,” I assure her.
As Bethany and Todd leave, Luke and Drew saunter into the conference room like they know they are about to get scolded. I shut the door behind us for effect.